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THE CUFFLINK

Name: THE CUFFLINK
Author: Susan Bolch
ISBN: 978-1-5439-4210-1

by Susan Bolch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2018

A rich assortment of fraught relationships bolsters this family story and its characters.

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A debut multigenerational novel focuses on a 20th-century Jewish American family.

When the book introduces Frederick Green, he is a young boy listening to his siblings practice their instruments. The Greens are a Jewish family living in Philadelphia in the 1930s. They may not be rich, but thanks to Fred’s father, a Latvian immigrant who sells insurance, they make do. Unfortunately, the family is struck by tragedy when Fred’s brother, Will, a violin virtuoso, dies at a young age. The calamity sends Fred’s sister, Lorraine, down a path that will end in her own early death. These events leave Fred as the sole Green child to make it in the world. But make it he does. Fred wins a college scholarship, becomes an ace boxer as an undergraduate, and eventually earns a law degree. He then opens his own law firm, marries into a wealthy family, and soon he and his wife have a child. Fred must painstakingly build his practice, yet all seems to be going well. The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 has Fred attempting to join the military, but, due to his age and status as a family man, he must settle for helping crack enemy codes as a civilian. Things take a dismal turn when Fred becomes caught up in a shady business deal run by his father-in-law. The whole affair, which includes accusations of arson, will cost Fred everything. With time and determination, however, he rebuilds and remarries. He even passes along his drive to a new daughter named Samantha, who will one day become an attorney just like her dad. Bolch’s ambitious story tends to focus on relationships, and they are mostly unhappy ones. From Fred’s sister’s abysmal marriage to a local boor to Samantha’s equally dreadful union with an overachiever, the partnerships are hardly glamorous. But it is through these difficult pairings that the tale generates its best material. Just as it seems someone has found the right person, it becomes very clear that is not the case. Samantha, for instance, becomes engaged to a medical student at Columbia. Watching such a seemingly excellent pairing fizzle gives the book the kind of palpable conflict that remains lacking in other areas. A number of scenes can be dull, including Fred’s law school graduation, which is no more thrilling that it sounds. Dialogue can often be dry, as when a suitor explains to Samantha rather flatly: “I’ll pick you up at six so that we can have dinner before the show.” Nevertheless, certain details give the saga color. Fred’s adventures take him to a once-famous resort in upstate New York while Samantha eventually finds herself in an indisputably gloomy Scranton, Pennsylvania. Still, more information might have painted a more robust picture. If the Greens reflect on the myriad changes in Pennsylvania and the country over the years, such musings are not noted.

A rich assortment of fraught relationships bolsters this family story and its characters.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5439-4210-1

Page Count: 480

Publisher: BookBaby

Review Posted Online: April 24, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.